CCR at MySpace

Description

MySpace
has done some pretty amazing things with the Robotic Developer Studio. When they found out it contained a very powerful component, the Concurrency and Coordination
Runtime (CCR), the architects built it into the architecture of MySpace, the largest .NET site in the world. At MySpace, I met Principal Architect Erik Nelson and Senior Architect Akash Patel who walked me through how they were using the CCR.
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The Discussion

Those are both pretty broad questions. I can't actually give an answer to our total throughput, but that's a combination of many technologies, so it's difficult to say how much CCR affects it directly.

As to how it improved performance, it was used as a part of a rearchtecture that happened concurrently with the site growing in size many times over. Since our load increased dramatically during the time period we were implementing it, and its use came along
with other changes in our middle tier, there really isn't an apples to apples comparison that can be made.

I apologize for the non-answers here, but if you have more specific questions, I can try to address them!

Within our search infrastructure we use the CCR to manage concurrency in our processing pipeline to assign indexing tasks to a pool of workers. The benefits we've receieved from using the CCR are that it simplifies concurrency management and provides a
very high level of throughput. At this time we are not currently using the CCR during search execution but are examining ways in which we can.